Research news

LONDON, 13 September. A new international research programme that hopes to solve the
riddle of how cells interact with each other is set to test the notion that scientists
must publish their findings or risk perishing their chances of receiving future funding
grants or promotion. The Alliance for Cellular Signalling (AFCS) will encourage investigators to share their findings and new discoveries by
posting them directly onto a special 'molecule page' that links into the AFCS website.
This, says Dr Alfred Gilman, chairman of the AFCS steering committee, will be "equivalent
to publishing in a scholarly journal" and will give researchers around the world the
chance to comment on the findings, theories and discoveries long before the work would
have been published by a journal. Gilman hopes that this novel approach will not only
"enable the solution of a major problem in biomedical research" but also "facilitate
the next evolutionary stage of integrative biomedical medicine."

The AFCS, launched last week, is being supported by a $25 million grant from the US
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) together with backing from
private industry. Fifty investigators from twenty universities in North America and
the UK will form the core contingent of the research program together with many of
the world's cell signalling community who are invited to join the AFCS program. The
research effort in the AFCS's six laboratories will concentrate on examining how modular
signal pathways interact with each other. In particular, the researchers will focus
on two cells that display interesting and important G-protein related phenomena: the
B lymphocyte and the cardiac myocyte. Gilman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1994
for his work with G-proteins, will head the project from the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center at Dallas. The ultimate result, suggests Gilman, could be the development
of a 'virtual cell', a computer program that would mimic the function of a cell. "A
virtual cell would be a wonderful way to understand what the optimal point would be
to place a drug to achieve a specific goal in a specific patient in a specific kind
of disease," says Gilman.

As research from the laboratories is completed and validated by the steering community,
new discoveries, findings or theories will be posted onto a 'molecule page' linked
to the AFCS website through Internet2 - the new university-based Internet that will
allow the rapid transmission of large amounts of information. The AFCS is hoping that
researchers will come to see having their results posted on a molecule page as being
equivalent to publishing in an academic journal. The investigators and members of
AFCS will then communicate through the website, using discussion groups and video
conferences to discuss the findings. In posting to the molecule pages, investigators
and their universities will instantly relinquish any intellectual property rights
they may have for the work. In order to guarantee to researchers that their professional
careers will not be damaged by relinquishing the right to publish in a journal, Gilman
says that the steering committee will provide documentation to Department Chairs,
Deans and Promotion Committees that validates the work of an individual investigator.
All of the work published on molecule pages will include the protocols used for each
experiment and any interpretation or speculation will be clearly marked as such. Gilman
is convinced the cell biology community will be keen to become involved in the AFCS,
"Because they are excited about contributing a fraction of their time to a collaborative
attempt to answer questions that they do not believe can be answered in conventional
ways."